CLIENT CASE STUDY

Pharmaceutical Company: Reducing IT Costs

Accenture’s application outsourcing services help a leading pharmaceutical company improve value, consistency and business performance.

Overview

At a leading specialty pharmaceutical company, the IT organization supported its commercial applications using numerous local staffing companies.

Together, the company and Accenture simplified commercial IT processes and supported commercial applications for the business units across 34 countries over 10 years. Accenture is delivering a streamlined and standardized application support model, using cost-efficient resources with the right skills to meet the company’s requirements.

As a result, Accenture’s blended offshore and onshore resources have saved 30 percent in support costs annually, while providing more consistent outcomes at a fixed cost. Process improvements have yielded savings of $500,000—approximately 3,000 man hours. The company can now refocus employees on more strategic initiatives that will help further improve performance.

Opportunity

At a leading specialty pharmaceutical company, the IT organization supported its commercial applications using numerous local staffing companies. As the company expanded, the ad hoc approach to resourcing led to higher costs and management overheads, a decreased ability to scale, planning difficulties, degraded productivity and quality, lost institutional knowledge from attrition and poor accountability from multiple vendors. The company needed to improve its cost effectiveness and efficiency with a streamlined, scalable application support landscape. It collaborated with Accenture to streamline its fragmented commercial IT application support landscape in three business units and decrease costs.

Solution

Accenture is helping the company manage its commercial IT applications over 10 years for the three business units across 34 countries. Together, they support key business activities like product launches, maintain the applications (providing Level 2 and 3 support), deliver process rigor and standardization, integrate data feeds from third-party vendors, resolve application issues and implement minor enhancements. Accenture brings in experienced people with relevant skills to identify creative ways in which the company could get more value from the team. Accenture also helped implement new standard operational metrics that enhanced reporting consistency, provided performance transparency and drove fact-based discussions on areas for improvement with various stakeholders in the IT ecosystem. Continuous improvement efforts help enhance the quality of services and processes.

Results

Accenture’s blended offshore and onshore resources have saved 30 percent in support costs annually, while providing more consistent outcomes at a fixed cost. Process improvements have yielded savings of $500,000—approximately 3,000 man hours. A standardized demand management process has helped to quickly and effectively prioritize enhancements across various functions and scale teams quickly across the globe. New standard metrics provided solid data to use in improving performance, with more consistent reporting and identification of problem areas throughout the IT ecosystem. More consistent, repeatable processes have helped reduce the number of data processing errors with critical service levels maintained at 100 percent. The company can now refocus employees on more strategic initiatives that will help further improve value and performance.

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